There’s nothing worse for a guy in my line of work to find out that a fix that remedies a critical bug is itself buggy. Case in point is the fixes that Intel put out for Spectre and Meltdown. Apparently they have bugs that cause system reboots:
Intel said today it is investigating an issue with Broadwell and Haswell CPUs after customers reported higher system reboot rates when they installed firmware updates for fixing the Spectre flaw.
The hardware vendor said these systems are both home computers and data center servers.
“We are working quickly with these customers to understand, diagnose and address this reboot issue, “said Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel Corporation.
“If this requires a revised firmware update from Intel, we will distribute that update through the normal channels. We are also working directly with data center customers to discuss the issue,” Shenoy added.
The Intel exec said users shouldn’t feel discouraged by these snags and continue to install updates from OS makers and OEMs.
Sure, right. this really inspires confidence. I say that because it suggests that Intel rushed these fixes out the door to mitigate not only the threat, but the PR disaster that is in progress. Of course if that’s true it is not good. My advice to Intel is to get to the bottom of this quickly and do whatever is required to get working patches on the street that have been fully QA’ed. Because if you don’t, you’ll look like Apple and their ability to QA their products.
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This entry was posted on January 12, 2018 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Intel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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#FAIL: Intel’s Meltdown And Spectre Fixes Have Bugs Of Their Own
There’s nothing worse for a guy in my line of work to find out that a fix that remedies a critical bug is itself buggy. Case in point is the fixes that Intel put out for Spectre and Meltdown. Apparently they have bugs that cause system reboots:
Intel said today it is investigating an issue with Broadwell and Haswell CPUs after customers reported higher system reboot rates when they installed firmware updates for fixing the Spectre flaw.
The hardware vendor said these systems are both home computers and data center servers.
“We are working quickly with these customers to understand, diagnose and address this reboot issue, “said Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel Corporation.
“If this requires a revised firmware update from Intel, we will distribute that update through the normal channels. We are also working directly with data center customers to discuss the issue,” Shenoy added.
The Intel exec said users shouldn’t feel discouraged by these snags and continue to install updates from OS makers and OEMs.
Sure, right. this really inspires confidence. I say that because it suggests that Intel rushed these fixes out the door to mitigate not only the threat, but the PR disaster that is in progress. Of course if that’s true it is not good. My advice to Intel is to get to the bottom of this quickly and do whatever is required to get working patches on the street that have been fully QA’ed. Because if you don’t, you’ll look like Apple and their ability to QA their products.
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This entry was posted on January 12, 2018 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Intel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.